Business need to admit IT mis-alignment before they can align

This point is critical both for the business and the executive in that buisness. In the ITIL book "Best Practices for Applicaiton Management" there is a phrase which articulates this perfectly.

"IT is not technology itself that supplies returns to a buisness,

but how technology is employed to meet business requirements."

Study by IBM and The Economist

The biggest issue is getting the buy-in by business to realise that there is a disjoint to how the business and IT need to work as one.

This alignment can be carried out in a number steps

1. Identify the different applications used by the business
2. look identify the diffeent busienss owners
3. finally identify the customers both internal and external

From this exercise we can then start to build a map of the physical systems and the flow of data through those systems. This looks to be the foundation to then start to understand how the business is using the technology and from there I would see we can then identify the value to the business and then start to build an alignment map and strategy.

A business cannot realise value from its IT until it has been algined. This was argued in 1993 by Henderson and Venkatraman of Harvard Unitversity, any search for these names with IT alignement will find more details.

This article is more a question, I understand the need its just getting the common view point and how that is achieved.